aside from the.... actual first hand evidence of it that Dave's Blog presented. You did RTFA, right?

the one you link to says this :

First, a statement of the obvious. Customer service reps are pretty much the last people who would know about such a policy, let alone be able to inform customers of it.

Not my experience at all.

Add to this the usual confounding factors—non-native English speakers, a desire to "resolve" the customer's problem as quickly as possible (even if this means simply agreeing to what they say just to make them go away), and insufficient knowledge to actually go off-script—and the statements that Raphael cites as evidence don't really stand up.:

Basically that counter 'evidence' is supposition. I suppose i could call that actual evidence, but I would hate myself in the morning. Even if I were to take it in as fact, it leaves a conclusion that either Verizon has very very bad customer service, or the bad policies towards traffic which have been documented, or both. I say both.

Glad to hear any actual evidence that they do not do this though, maybe some broad based traffic studies - rather than the accumulated rounding errors that you would like us to assume adds up to a much less likely story of absolute innocence and corporate right-doing.

But their court ruling was only a few weeks ago, and their throttling started at least a few years ago, though, hasn't it? Or are Verizon's connections just unstable/badly maintained, because they're the internet company and they don't have to worry about customers switching where there aren't other internet providers?

I believe Verizon is throttling Netflix and YouTube, but I don't believe that this customer service rep has any idea what he is talking about.

It's almost impossible to prove throttling, it could just be congestion server side or something. However, I have noticed times when my FiOS link is unable to stream YouTube without major stuttering, while my wife's AT&T cellphone buffers practically the whole thing instantly over 3G. The Netflix problem is especially suspicious, since it happened right about the time Netflix and Verizon had that spat over the content delivery box Netflix wanted to give to Verizon, but was refused because Verizon wants to charge them for the bandwidth. That's when previously rock solid 1080 streams suddenly started flipping between 720 and 1080 constantly no matter the time of day. It was really obnoxious because my TV needs a second or two to redo the HDMI handshake when it happens, which makes the experience very disruptive.

Plus, this is Verzion, given their past history, I have absolutely no trouble believing that they're willing to provide shitty service in the hopes of extorting more money from content providers.

Kneecapping AWS generally, rather than doing something more specific to Netflix and similar would be a somewhat unexpected move.

Shaking down competitors to your own crap cable and quasi-cable video services? 100% expected. Rolling the dice and just hitting AWS? Amazon, insane as it would have sounded a few years ago, is verging on being the kleenex of cheap 'n flexible hosting (less so for fixed-load stuff; but for potentially elastic demand, they are a force of nature). Messing with AWS would mean hitting a broad, nearly random, and not necessarily predictable cross section of sites.